


Fifteen Things They Love

by StopLookingHere



Series: Fifty Two Levihan Fanfictions in Fifty Two Weeks [10]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: F/M, Fluff, prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-07
Updated: 2016-03-07
Packaged: 2018-05-25 09:18:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6188815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StopLookingHere/pseuds/StopLookingHere
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>10/52: A countdown</p><p>Fifteen things they love about each other, from attributes to memories.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fifteen Things They Love

**Author's Note:**

> dedicate this to my few friends IRL who read my stuff-- cheers, y'all.

There are fifteen things they love about each other. In reality, there are more, but there are fifteen solid ones they can both agree on. 

She loves his cleanliness. It’s a small, insignificant thing that she would never admit publicly, but she might actually be jealous. She loves the way he wakes up every Saturday morning to clean his shoes and condition the worn leather straps of his 3DMG with foul smelling balm. Lye and lavender oil, his scent, make up that love too. She doesn’t realize until he’s gone on an expedition without her that she misses him constantly dousing her lab bench in bleach, the smell stinging her eyes enough that she has to leave just a couple minutes, at most. When she had been at the survey corps for fifteen years, it was the first scent that she had truly inhaled.

In contrast, he loves her dirt. He loves the splotches of dirt from where she itches at the straps of her goggles on her neck, sometimes mixed with blood, sometimes with an unidentifiable solution that should definitely probably not be there. Her constant teetering of books upon books in a frenzy of knowledge and searching leaves pages fluttered everywhere, but it’s comforting when the lab stops smelling sterile and more like must and old books.

It takes him approximately fourteen minutes to write a detailed field report for his squad. His handwriting is in sharp, narrow characters, even sharp on _no._ It takes her approximately fourteen hours to get one written, much to Erwin’s chagrin. Sometimes he helps her out, making her rewrite it in her loopy characters so Erwin doesn’t get on their case.

Once in a blue moon, she draws them a bath and soaks in it, commonly falling asleep to the scent of mint and eucalyptus even though it’s only thirteen on the clock. He’s ready to go but he lets her sleep, because her eyelids are tinged with a soft purple huge and it’s the most beautiful color he’s ever seen. When he runs the bath, events happen in a very particular order and a different kind of mayhem almost always occurs. They race to finish one time, at a record of thirteen minutes.

When she was twelve, she went through every training routine that every military member had to go through. Curiously, she noticed that nobody had considered the novel idea of hitting from above, and not from below. It took her twelve months to develop the first prototype of the three-dimensional maneuver gear, passing the ideas onto headquarters for later mass production. Twelve years later, Levi polishes his maneuver gear under the light of a candle, Isabel snickering at him for repeatedly going back to one spot that just wouldn’t be clean.

He receives eleven pieces of candy from Hange when Isabel and Farlan die, tied up in a cloth bag with no two alike. The sweets are sad in his mouth, but so is her tongue as she pours herself onto him over whispered truths and unfamiliar ideas in his head, in the same spot that the trio had sat only days before.

She loves the way he spends ten minutes each morning making a pot of tea, the black kind with little to no creamer or sugar. He says he prefers the bitterness of tea but this one’s smooth, so it reminds him of her. It reminds her more of him, so she takes a cup of it and cuts it with so much sugar that she has to eat it out of the bottom of the cup. He calls her disgusting and eats the sugar off her lips.

There’s one time where Hange spends an astounding nine days without a full night’s sleep or a decent meal, and she spends all that time poring over samples of Eren, much to his discontent. Levi brings her the things that she doesn’t have to sit down and eat, because one of the first things he figured out about her was that she was more dedicated than the first pages of a novel. She sips broth out of a metal tin and falls in love with his cooking over a microscope, while he falls in love with her tapered fingers as they hold up a paper-thin wafer of flesh up to the sunlight of the window, the warm hue falling over her brown eyes.

They once sit down with Mike, Oluo, Petra, and the rest of the veteran crew and drown out their sorrows the old fashioned way. Hange watches him under hooded eyelids as he takes his eighth shot, still as bright eyed as a cat on alert. Levi reminders her that he is no scientist, but he is sure that a ninth shot of whiskey will result in alcohol poisoning for her. She takes his advice and at Petra’s direction, chugs eight glasses of water before bed. Over the course of the next day, she brings him eight pieces of blackened bread.

Seven days is the amount of time it takes for Hange to convince Erwin to allow her to capture two more titans, much to Levi’s discontent. While she speaks to Bean and Sawney under the hood of a tent, he sits outside and counts the hours until sunrise at seven in the morning, when maybe she’ll get out of that damned tent.

There are six aesthetic things about each other that they love, too. He loves her height, and vice versa. One of her favorite things to do is rest her head on top of his, earning a frown from him and a smirk from her. He loves the way her hair looks when it’s down, and she’ll let him brush it as long as she can feel the shaved part of his hair when they cuddle at night. Hange constantly has the strongest urge to fill in his thin eyebrows, while he plucks her stray eyebrows before important meetings so she looks a little cleaner than usual. He loves the way she tastes and she loves that too. He loves and is infuriated by the way she dresses, simplistic and plain and without any general care about aesthetics. She loves the way he looks in her jackets that are just a little too big for him, making him look like a big kid in his father’s jacket. Neither of them want to forget the time they slept out in an abandoned home outside the walls, strapping their maneuver gear over their pajamas. Fighting alongside each other, her with yellow slippers with duck’s heads on the top and him in baby blue with his hair all mussed, they were reminded what life was like without caring about appearances. Once a dove got caught in the dining hall, and it was Hange who rescued it and Levi who returned it back to health. They both loved each other quite a lot after that.

One day, nestled in the pages of an old book that hasn’t been opened for who knows how long, Hange discovers a very old image. It’s been put on some shiny paper and dated “January 07, 2004.” Five people sit with odd hats that vaguely look like mouse ears in front of a large blue castle, a state of a man and a cartoon-ish mouse behind them. Levi refuses to let her report it to Erwin, instead crafting elaborate tales of what the photograph might be of so she is lulled to sleep at night. Hange begins to write a novel, explaining the photo to the best of her knowledge.

It takes three visits to his room for Hange to become integrated in his life. She dumps her goggles on his nightstand the first night, brings her own teacup on the second, and leaves her maneuver gear there the third. It takes Levi about three seconds to realize he has no say or choice in this integration.

The second time they are on an expedition and it rains, Levi has a panic attack at their hideout. It’s small and quite frankly she’s surprised he hasn’t had one on an expedition sooner, but it’s important nonetheless. While he sobs into her chest, quieter than a child who is trying to hide, he asks her again and again if he’s going to die because he really _does_ feel like he’s going to die. She assures him that he isn’t going to die. Petra brings him tea in a cup without a handle and he clutches it like a lifeline.

The number one thing is so basic and human that they can hardly believe it’s the most important, lying in bed next to each other, him hearing her heartbeat and her chin in his mop of black hair. Her breaths are deeper than his, but his body is warmer than hers. It takes them a little while to identify it, but it’s sure and true.

She’s alive. He’s alive. They zero in on that one basic primal idea, of crimson in veins and the oxidation of oxygen into compounds. They’re fascinated in the way that lucidity gives into fascination with dust motes, shining in the light of the morning. It’s a level of synchronization that she had never hypothesized to happen between the two, and yet it was.

 

**Author's Note:**

> edited 03.08.16 because holy crap I should proofread.


End file.
